Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2004 17:32:51 -0600 From: "Matthew D. Fuller" <fullermd@over-yonder.net> To: Scott Long <scottl@freebsd.org> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x Message-ID: <20040108233251.GP48603@over-yonder.net> In-Reply-To: <3FFDDB7A.3000804@freebsd.org> References: <20040107235737.I32227@pooker.samsco.home> <20040108075059.GK53429@silverwraith.com> <20040108075811.GJ48603@over-yonder.net> <20040108015954.V32598@pooker.samsco.home> <20040108101451.GK48603@over-yonder.net> <20040108033905.A32598@pooker.samsco.home> <20040108220249.GM48603@over-yonder.net> <3FFDDB7A.3000804@freebsd.org>
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On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 03:36:42PM -0700 I heard the voice of Scott Long, and lo! it spake thus: > > Unfortunately, there are two problems with this. Now, > The first is that it runs after the kernel has already booted, so SCSI > devices that are handled by drivers on this floppy won't get probed. This I hadn't known. Why is that? I thought when you loaded a module it pulled up the driver and probed the hardware, which included scanning any busses on it. > The second is that forcing the user to know which driver is appropriate > for their hardware is not very good form. This is one of those things I list under the category of "letting floppy installs be a bit ugly, or 'experienced-users only'-labelled". > There are several documents linked off of http://www.freebsd.org/releng > that describe how to build a release. It's not nearly as arcane of a > process as it used to be 5 years ago. The biggest barrier to entry is > probably disk space. You'll need a good 5GB free to hold the CVS repo, > chroot environment, and resulting bits. Well, I've got the CVS repo, though boy, has *THAT* ever grown since I built this system; I had to trim it down to only src and ports, and even so: /dev/da1s1e 2032623 1769089 100925 95% /usr/cvs Of course, I left out the ports and docs parts of the release last time I tried (which was in fact about 5 years ago ;), though I had all kinda of troubles with parts of THAT, too. But still, I don't have even a tenth that much hard drive space around. > Yes, to build the floppies you need to build most of the release, but > once you've built the release, you can back-step and rebuild the > floppies at will. And building the whole release is quite an ordeal on a Pentium Pro :) Still, I'm willing to donate some time and brain to the problem, since apparently I kinda care about it. It seems to me that the probing problem above is the biggest problem from a real coding POV; the rest is mostly just a whole heck of a lot of implementation, and "inconvenience" from the usability standpoint. That's a breaking point. -- Matthew Fuller (MF4839) | fullermd@over-yonder.net Systems/Network Administrator | http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/ "The only reason I'm burning my candle at both ends, is because I haven't figured out how to light the middle yet"
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